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Daily Archives for September 18, 2014

New technologies for doors arrive more frequently due to developments in materials technology, and also occasionally due to design innovations. Improvised doors are offered by building components’ manufacturers, and sometimes devised by creative designers. But ideas for radically different types of doors have been adopted from literature like scientific fiction, children’s stories of adventures, media such as scientific movies, television serials, and from video games. New doors have been modelled on various gadgets and industrial equipments. Unusual opening systems have come from submarines, space capsules, cameras, chemical reaction vessels, dams, dykes, deep sea drilling units etc. Such opening systems may not be recognized as a door, but rather function like a valve or controller of opening.

Hangar One at Moffett Field 1963 USA with segmental folding doors

Isolation areas in research laboratories and nano technology plants require hermetically sealed zones need doors with a positive seal (completely leak-proof). Very large and light weight structures, such as domes and roofs require openings for access to external face. Such circular flexible doors of membrane or skin thin materials diverge to edges for closing, but bulge or sink to a concave or convex form due to suction or pressure. Heart valves are implants that beat, but function like a door. Air curtain fans and showers create a wall of cascading air and water, but a breach-able door opening. Similarly sonar zones, in industrial plants remove particulate matter from the things that move in or out are also a door system. Offshore or deep sea marine structures such as oil-gas drilling platform and recovery or collection centres, coastal protection barriers such as dykes have doors for water. The water gates were once devised as very large geometric or space structures but are now built as membrane or shell structures.

PVC strip door for warehouses eliminates the bother of closing-opening

Industrial doors are very large and intensively used openings. Normal sliding, folding or swinging shutters take a lot of time to close or open and with every such operation the interior environment gets corrupted. Air curtains are noisy and cold. Flap curtains of non tearing polymer or composite sheets have proved a better option. Ion charged openings and sonar barriers are not very satisfactory in many applications. Some radical solution is required.

A pound lock on the Keitele-Päijänne Canal at Äänekoski in Central Finland

NEW CONCEPTS for OPENINGS’ SYSTEMS

A door is perceived to be an opening in a barrier, an open-able component of the barrier system. However, if whole of a barrier were to disappear, collapse (physically shrink) or become non-functional for a while, then it can serve the function of an opening. A barrier will have to collapse to its edge or perimeter, away from its centre, almost like the folding leaves of a camera shutter. Here the leaves could be of gaseous or liquid substance, or a field of energy. Games, science fiction and movies explore such radical concepts.

A door has traditionally served the purpose of entry and exit to and from a space and one world to another to another (earth to heaven or hell). Egyptians painted an image of a door but new modes of transfer, transport or travel such as in movies and TV serial Star Trek. Tele-porting may entirely change the shape, size and configuration of the door in future, perhaps it will be a controller of opening rather than a door. An opening that can be cut anywhere in the barrier or membrane, a self seaming door is a sci-fiction concept emulating the biological healing.